AGONIZING MINUTES: A woman outside Sandy Hook Elementary School yesterday frantically tries to get word on her sister, a teacher there.AP

AGONIZING MINUTES: A woman outside Sandy Hook Elementary School yesterday frantically tries to get word on her sister, a teacher there. (
)

It started like any normal December day at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Kids were discussing what presents they want from Santa. The previous night’s holiday concert was the talk among the teachers. But the sunny morning was soon shattered by gunfire.

“We heard some shots,” said 9-year-old Venesa Bajraliu, who was in an art room when she heard screams coming over the school’s intercom. “I was thinking if anyone got hurt and if everyone was all right . . . My teacher was scared and a little shaky.”

Police sources said killer Adam Lanza, 20, had stormed into the Newtown, Conn., school armed with high-powered handguns shortly after 9:30 a.m.

The nearly 700-student facility, rated the No. 2 elementary school in Connecticut just two years ago, had recently implemented a new security policy. But the safety plans didn’t help, as Lanza coldly executed his unthinkable attack, killing 26 innocents there, including 20 young students and the school principal.

“I saw some of the bullets going down the hall, and then a teacher pulled me into her classroom,” one student told WCBS-TV.

Newtown resident Brad Tefft said kids barely more than toddlers had to make their way past gruesome casualties to escape.

“My neighbor’s daughter is in kindergarten at the school,” Tefft told The Post. “She was in the classroom when the shooter came in and shot the teacher. She ran out past a couple of bleeding bodies.”

As roughly 100 shots rang out, the students and teachers fled for their lives.

“It was horrendous,” parent Brenda Lebinski, whose daughter is in the third grade, told NBC.

“Everyone was in hysterics, parents, students. There were kids coming out of the school bloodied. I don’t know if they were shot, but they were bloodied.”

Lebinski told The Post a classmate of her daughter, Sofia, could hear a man in the hallway shouting “f–k you” while they huddled together in a locked classroom.

Someone managed to get on the school intercom. Gunfire could be heard in the background of the announcement.

“It really started when she heard gunshots and screams on the intercoms,” a relative of one young girl told MSNBC.

A female student in the gym at the time of the attack told WVIT-TV: “The gym teachers told us to go into the corner. I kept hearing these booming noises. We all started crying, so all the gym teachers told us to go into the office where no one could find us.”

As fear and chaos gripped the school, teachers acted quickly, and were hailed as heroes.

One of them was music teacher Maryrose Kristopik, who the night before led students in the school holiday concert. She was credited with protecting 15 children by barricading the music-room door while the gun-wielding Lanza pounded on it in a fury.

“The shooter kept banging on the door screaming, ‘Let me in! Let me in!’ But he didn’t get in,” a parent said, according to the Daily Mail.